On the Politics of the Mob

The angry mob confront the Monster (played by Boris Karloff) 

in Frankenstein (dir. James Whale, 1931)

 

'Madness is something rare in individuals - but in groups, parties, peoples, 

and ages, it is the rule.' [1]

 

 

I. 

 

The term mob was a late-17th century slang abbreviation of the Latin phrase mobile vulgus, referring to an excitable and disorderly crowd of people who would often seek out a target or scapegoat on whom they could vent their fury and frustration over some matter or other.    

 

Even as a young child, long before I knew anything about mass psychology, I had an instinctive aversion to the mob. 

 

I remember, for example, watching Frankenstein for the first time and - without feeling particularly sorry for the Monster - intensely disliking the torch-bearing villagers who formed an angry mob in order to hunt him down [2].    

 

I may not have had the language at ten-years-old to articulate how I felt, but I could see there was something far more frightening - far more monstrous - about mob justice (i.e., vengeance) than about the Creature in all his otherness.     

 

 

II. 

 

And today, when I do possess the language (and know a fair bit about mass psychology), I still don't like to see any individual - whatever crimes they are accused of - being intimidated and, on occasion, torn limb from limb or burnt alive by the mob (again, this doesn't necessarily mean my sympathies lie with them). 

And that's why I cannot support any populist political movement or join in with any act of indecent bullying. As D. H. Lawrence writes, any man or woman who would affirm their own starry singularity must refuse to identify with the baying mob. It is not sentimentalism: it is just abiding by one's own feelings no matter what [3]. 

 

It's unfortunate, therefore, that today politicians on all sides seem intent on making an appeal to the masses (manipulating their concerns, their fears, their insecurities, etc.) and, on account of this intention, are compelled to "transform their principles into great al fresco stupidities" [4] and start waving flags (which, to my mind, belong in the same category as burning torches and pitchforks).  

 

To paraphrase Voltaire: As soon as the mob gets involved, then all is lost ... [5]

 

 

Notes

 

[1] Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, trans. R. J. Hollingdale (Penguin Books, 1990), Pt. IV, §156, p. 103.  

 

[2] The famous scene of Frankenstein's monster being chased by an angry mob of peasants (eventually being trapped and burned alive inside an old windmill) belongs to the 1931 cinematic adaptation of Mary Shelley's 1818 novel; such a scene does not occur in the book.

      To be fair to the villagers, the Creature was responsible for the drowning of a young girl, Maria, whom he throws into a lake (albeit in playful innocence rather than with murderous intent). Click here to watch the formation of the mob. And here for the terrible conclusion to mob justice (what Jean-François Lyotard terms paganism).  

 

[3] See the famous 'Nightmare' chapter of Lawrence's 1923 novel Kangaroo in which the protagonist Richard Somers refuses under any circumstances to acquiesce in the vast mob-spirit that prevailed during the years 1916-19 when, in his view - thanks to the War - so many lost their individual integrity. 

      The Cambridge edition of this work, ed. Bruce Steele, was published in 1994. The long 'Nightmare' chapter is on pp. 212-259.     

 

[4] Nietzsche, Human, All Too Human, trans. R. J. Hollingdale (Cambridge University Press, 1986), Vol. I, Pt. 8, §438, p. 161.

[5] The actual line written by Voltaire reads: Quand la populace se mêle de raisonner, tout est perdu. It can be found in his Collection des lettres sur les miracles, Vol. 60D of his Œuvres complètes, ed. Olivier Ferret and José-Michel Moureaux (Voltaire Foundation / University of Oxford, 2018). 

      The original work of this title - a 232 page volume composed of various short writings from the period - was published in 1766.   

 

Notes on Jean Baudrillard's 'Why Hasn't Everything Already Disappeared?' (Part 2: Sections VI - XII)

Cover of the paperback edition 

(Seagull Books, 2016)

  

This is a continuation of a post the first part of which can be read by clicking here. 

 

 

VI.

 

The human subject - that product of power, knowledge, and history - with its free-willing moral agency, is also, says Baudrillard, disappearing today, but leaving "its ghost behind, its narcissistic double, more or less as the Cat left its grin hovering" [27].

 

Freed from an actual subject, this ectoplasmic remnant of subjectivity is to be found everywhere today (just like sexuality, freed from the biological reality of sex, is found everywhere but in bodies); enveloping and transforming everything; remaking the world in its own image, ensuring that there's no outside, no otherness, no objective world.  

 

Consciousness has been smashed to smithereens and dispersed into "all the interstices of reality" [28] producing a smart world of interconnected systems and artificial intelligence; a digital utopia. And in such a world, who needs human subjects in the old-fashioned sense? They have become superfluous and so may as well disappear ...

 

 

VII. 

 

But again the question will be raised: have there not been some positive disappearances? Certain diseases, for example, and other threats to human health and safety. 

 

Well, yes, that's true - although it should be remembered that things we thought had gone for good often come back with a vengeance; "we know", writes Baudrillard, "that everything repressed or eliminated [...] results in a malign, viral infiltration of the social and individual body" [30-31] sooner or later.  

 

Disappearance is never the end of the matter any more than appearance is the beginning of the matter: things come and go and eternally return and life itself is nothing other than this vital game of appearance, disappearance, and reappearance [g].

 

 

VIII. 

 

Moving on, Baudrillard brings the discussion around to the image, behind which, he says, something has always and already disappeared: "And that is the source of its fascination" [32]. 

 

In other words, it's not virtual reality that excites us - is anything more boring at last? - it's the fact that behind it lies a vital dimenson of existence, albeit one that is withdrawn and concealed. It's the real - or, more precisely, the disappearance of the real - that excites everyone. 

 

(Baudrillard often seems at pains to stress the total ambiguity of his own position on this issue, which throws up paradox after paradox and "cannot, in any way, be resolved" [32].) 

 

 

IX. 

 

The destiny of the image is to make the revolutionary move from the analogical to the digital. Baudrillard thinks of this as an irresistible process which leads to a world which "no longer has need of us, nor of our representation" [34]; for when "software wins out over the eye" [37] who needs the photographer?  

 

When the photograph is liberated "from both the negative and the real world" [34], this has consequences for objects too; who needs them to be present when they can now be digitally generated (and erased) by AI? 

 

Baudrillard writes:

 

"The traditional photograph is an image produced by the world, which, thanks to the medium of film, still involves a dimension of representation. The digital image is an image that comes straight out of the screen ..." [ 37] [h] and lacks punctual exactitude. 

 

Again, for anyone who cares about the art of photography - "conceived as the convergence of the light from the object with the light from the gaze" [38] - this is not merely an advance in technology, it's a disaster; "the sophistication of the play of presence and absence, of appearance and disappearance" [38] is abolished with the arrival of the digital age. 

 

The world - "and our vision of the world" [39] - is changed forever. It seems you cannot liberate photography via digitalisation, only destroy it with violence inflicted upon the "sovereignty of images" [59], subjecting them to a single perspective.   

 

Now, non-photographers might shrug their shoulders and ask so what. But what is happening in the world of photography is "just one tiny example of what is happening on a massive scale in all fields [...] The same destiny of digitalisation looms over the world of the mind and the whole range of thought" [39-40], so philosophers had better beware too!

 

 

X. 

 

When you replace the "entire symbolic articulation of language" [40] with an endless flow of information, then there are no silences or spaces suspended between illusion and reality in which to pause and think. 

 

Just as photography is about more than the proliferation and circulation of images, thinking is about more than word processing and fact checking - and the further we advance in the direction of digitalisation the further we shall be from "the secret - and the pleasure - of both" [43]. 

 

The brain is not a type of computer. And AI is not a form of thinking and knows nothing of the intelligence of evil [i]. 

 

 

XI. 

 

Should we save silence? 

 

Obviously, as someone who has argued that silence, stillness, secrecy, and shadows should be central to the practice of occultism in an age of transparency - click here - I'm going to answer yes to this question. 

 

But I also think we should preserve the absence; i.e., the nothingness that lies at the heart of the world and which is "as essential to life as are air and wind to the flight of the dove" [j]. 

 

 

XII. 

  

However else we might describe Baudrillard's thinking on the triumph of the machine, it's certainly pessimistic. 

 

Human beings, he concludes, may now be free to "operate within an integral individuality, free from all history and subjective constraints" [62], but it comes at a price: "it is clear that mankind exists only at the cost of its own death" [62]. 

 

In other words, our immortality is achieved only via our own technological disappearance and our "inscription in the digital order (the mental diaspora of the networks)" [92]. 

 

Lawrence would agree: Heidegger would agree: Byung-Chul Han would agree: and I think, ultimately, I agree too (even though I like taking snaps on my i-Phone - many of which end up here on TTA).  

 

And who knows, perhaps if we push the process of digitalisation all the way to its outer limits something surprising will happen and all that has disappeared will reappear in brutal solidity once more (just as impressionism's escape into pure light and colour gave way to post-impressionism and the return of great lumpy bodies and landscapes that made one nostalgic for mud and substance [k]).    

 

Perhaps objects will rediscover their singularity and we'll rediscover our analogue duality on the other side of digital integrity; i.e., the most radical - most demonic - element of human being that is also the most necessary and from which we derive our antagonistic vitalism.  

 

For as Zarathustra said, "'man needs what is most evil in him for what is best in him'" [l].  

 

  

Notes 

 

[g] Any Heideggerians reading this might be mumbling the word Unverborgenheit to themselves at this point and I suppose that Heidegger's concept might be borrowed (and adapted) in order to discuss the appearance (disclosure) and disappearance (concealment) of beings and worlds, although Baudrillard makes no such attempt to do so.

 

[h] Later in his text, Baudrillard will describe CGI as an ultimate form of violence committed against the image; one which "puts an end even to the imagining of the image" [45]. 

 

[i] For Baudrillard, the intelligence of evil is a dualistic principle of reversability which underlies the world operating outside of moral reason and challenges the integral reality (and hegemony) of the digital world. In other words, it's a force of instability and conflict that reveals the cracks and contradictions in a system which thinks itself whole and perfect. 

 

[j] Jean Baudrillard and Enrique Valiente Noailles, Exiles from Dialogue (Polity Press, 2007), pp. 134-35.

      This line is quoted by François L'Yvonnet in his Foreword to Why Hasn't Everything Already Disappeared? and he reminds readers that this is a reference to (and rejection of) Kant's idea that a bird would fly even faster and higher were it free of all resistance. For L'Yvonnet, nihilism isn't the affirmation of nothingness, but the forgetting (or negating) of nothingness in order to bring everything to full presence.  

 

[k] I'm paraphrasing D. H. Lawrence writing in 'Introduction to These Paintings', in Late Essays and Articles, ed. James T. Boulton (Cambridge University Press, 2005), pp. 182-217. See pp. 197-199 in particular for Lawrence's analysis of impressionism and post-impressionism. 

 

[l] See Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, trans. Walter Kaufmann, in The Portable Nietzsche, ed. Walter Kaufmann (Penguin Books, 1976), p. 330. The line comes from the section entitled 'The Convalescent', in Part 3 of Zarathustra.  

 

 

Notes on Jean Baudrillard's 'Why Hasn't Everything Already Disappeared?' (Part 1: Sections I-V)

Seagull Books (2009)

 

 

I. 

 

Every day, one reads of yet another plant or animal facing extinction, or of natural resources rapidly being depleted [a].

 

But extinction, of course, is a natural phenomenon; just as the exhaustion of reserves is a physical process, whereas disappearance - at least in the sense that Baudrillard uses the term with reference to human beings - is something very different.    

 

For Baudrillard, just as reality vanishes into the virtual, man disappears as a result of his own idealistic transformation of the world: 

 

"The human species is doubtless the only one to have invented a specific mode of disappearance that has nothing to do with Nature's law. Perhaps even an art of disappearance." [b]   

 

II. 

 

Whilst our mode of disappearance may perhaps be an art, nevertheless the modern transformation of the world into something that can be unambiguously known, was accomplished via science and technology. 

 

It's one of those ironic things that just as we create a world of value and meaning for ourselves, a world over which we can exercise mastery with our minds and our machines, we set the stage for our own disappearance.   

 

"But doubtless we have to go back even further - as far as concepts and language. By representing things to ourselves, by naming them and conceptualising them, human beings call them into existence and at the same time hasten their doom, subtly detach them from their brute reality." [11]

 

Things - objects - do not like to be dragged into the light and subject to human analysis; it is their nature to withdraw into ontological darkness and thus retain a reality that always exceeds their relations to other objects (including us) [c].

 

The moment a thing is identified - "the moment representation and concepts take hold of it" [12] - that's the precise moment when it begins to lose its volcanic vitalism and begins its disappearance. 

 

Just as, on the other hand, the moment concepts or ideas (but also fantasies, dreams, and desires) achieve their realisation, the game is up and they begin to dissolve before your very eyes. That's why one should be careful of what one wishes for ...

 

 

III. 

 

One should also be careful not to achieve one's full potential. 

 

For despite what the American psychologist Abraham Maslow and his followers teach, "what is proper to human beings is not to realise all their possibilities" [15], but, rather, recognise their limitations, celebrate their imperfections, and hold on to those negative traits that we need to exist as mortals (only God doesn't cast a shadow). 

 

Self-actualisation - driven by "an impulse to go as far as possible" [19] in the expression of all one's power and potential  - may promise a type of immortality, but this extreme endeavour results ultimately in the "virtual disappearance of the human species" [19]. 

 

In other words, the dream of defeating death and becoming immortal results in a fate that is arguably worse than death. 

 

 

IV. 

      

Having said that, Baudrillard at this point makes a sort of U-turn and suggests we might, after all, conceive of disappearance differently: "as a singular event and the object of a specific desire, the desire to no longer be there, which is not negative at all" [21]. 

 

In staging our own disappearance as a material art (beyond aesthetics), we might be able to "see what the world looks like in our absence [...] or to see, beyond the end, beyond the subject, beyond all meaning, beyond the horizon of disappearance, if there is still an occurrence of the world, an unprogrammed appearance of things" [21] [d].  

 

In other words, is it possible to see the world as it is and not as the real world (which is only ever a world of representation)?

 

It's an interesting question ... Perhaps one that only those artists who know how to "play on their disappearance, make use of it as a living form, exploit it by excess" [22] will find the answer to [e].

 

The trick, ultimately, is "to disappear before dying and instead of dying" [25]; not to artificially survive.

 

 

V. 

 

This is important: "nothing just vanishes; of everything that disappears there remain traces" [25] (my italics). 

 

Think of the Cheshire Cat, for example, "whose grin still hovers in the air after the rest of him has vanished" [25]. Or think of God - he's been dead for ages, but, his shadow, as Nietzsche says, will still be seen for thousands of years (and I wonder if mankind will ever have done with his judgement) [f].  

 

Baudrillard writes:

 

"We may thus suppose that everything that disappears - institutions, values, prohibitions, ideologies, even ideas - continues to lead a clandestine existence and exert an occult influence, as was said of the ancient gods who, in the Christian era, assumed the form of demons. Everything that disappears seeps back into our lives in infinitesimal doses, often more dangerous than the visible authority that ruled over us." 

 

That's true: we are masters at internalising everything and allowing the invisible souls of the dear departed to find a home within us; the dead they do not die and, ultimately, nothing ever disappears.   

 

 

Notes

 

[a] The International Union for Conservation of Nature currently has over 47,000 species on their Red List of Threatened Species: click here. 

      The United Nations Environment Programme produced a 2024 report on the manner in which the global economy is consuming ever more natural resources, at an ever faster rate: click here.   

 

[b] Jean Baudrillard, Why Hasn't Everything Already Disappeared?, trans. Chris Turner, with images by Alain Willaume (Seagull Books, 2009), p. 9. Future page references to this book will be given in the post itself.  

      This text - one of the last that Baudrillard wrote before his death in March 2007 - was originally published in French as Pourquoi tout n'a-t-il pas déjà disparu? (L'Herne, 2007). 

      When I first read this little book fifteen years ago I wasn't sure I understood it. In fact, I'm not sure I correctly understand it even now, so readers are advised that the notes assembled here may give a mistaken interpretation of (or false gloss to) Baudrillard's thinking.   

 

[c] Graham Harman has discussed this at great length and in great detail in his work; see, for example, his 2018 book Object-Oriented Ontology: A New Theory of Everything (Pelican Books). 

      I have discussed this book in a post dated 24 March 2018: click here. And for another post discussing Harman's philosophy, click here.  

 

[d] Later on, Baudrillard writes: "Have we not always had the deep-seated phantasy of a world that would go on without us? The poetic temptation to see the world in our absence, free of any human, all-too-human will?" [52]. 

      One thinks of Rupert Birkin's dream of a post-human world of nothing but grass and the odd hare sitting up in D. H. Lawrence's Women in Love (1920). 

 

[e] Baudrillard remains sceptical about the role that art will play. He writes:

      "Art itself in the modern period exists only on the basis of its disappearance - not just the art of making the real disappear and supplanting it with another scene, but the art of abolishing itself in the course of its practice [...] It was by doing this that it constituted an event, that it was of decisive importance. I say 'was' advisedly, for art today, though it as disappeared, doesn't know it has disappeared and [...] continues in its trajectory in a vegetative state." [22]

      The same, of course, might be said of politics today.  

 

[f] See Nietzsche, The Gay Science, Book III, §108. 

 

 

Part 2 of this post (sections VI-XII) can be read by clicking here. 

 

 

A Brief Note on the Assassination of Charlie Kirk

 Charlie Kirk and the man accused of his murder Tyler Robinson

  

One of the great ironies of politics today - noted by Jean Baudrillard on more than one occasion in his writings [1] - is that whilst those on the paleoconservative right claim to be Christians and to represent moral values, it is actually those on the radical left who most faithfully (and fanatically) subscribe to the moral distinction good/evil (as opposed to the non-moralistic distinction good/bad) [2].  

 

And it's because of this that whilst the former tend to think their political opponents mistaken (and possibly a little naive, foolish, or crazy), the latter are prone to believe anyone who doesn't share their worldview must be a Nazi; i.e., irredeemably evil and thus not someone with whom one can reason or debate but, rather, someone who, like Charlie Kirk, must be killed (and deserves to die) [3]. 

 

 

Notes

 

[1] See, for example, what Baudrillard writes in his essay 'A Conjuration of Imbeciles' (1997), which can be found in The Conspiracy of Art, ed. Sylvère Lotringer, trans. Ames Hodes (Semiotext(e), 2005), pp. 30-35. 

      In brief, Baudrillard attempts to address the question of why it is "everything moral, orthodox and conformist, which was traditionally associated with the right, passed to the left?" (p. 30), whilst, on the other hand, all the political and intellectual vitality once associated with the latter has moved to the far right, allowing figures like Charlie Kirk (and his hero Donald Trump) to come to the fore and gain huge followings.

      Readers who are interested might like to see the post published on 10 November 2016 in which I discuss this: click here.     

 

[2] Nietzsche famously analysed this crucial first step in what he terms the slave revolt in morals in the first essay of the Genealogy (1887).

      Unlike those strong natures confident enough to affirm themselves as good and who only feel the need to ascribe the term bad to others as a kind of afterthought, those who identify as marginalised or victimised in some manner and who seek revenge (or what they call social justice), define themselves as good only having first demonised others as evil and by cancelling all ideas that do not fit into their moral-ideological conception of the world. 

 

[3] We see this in some of the shameful videos uploaded to social media by those who think it acceptable to openly celebrate his murder.  

      Whilst we don't yet know the suspect's motivation for shooting Kirk, investigators say there's evidence to suggest he may have been politically radicalised online and sympathetic to Antifa, a far-left movement with members who are not opposed to violent direct action.

      This evidence includes inscriptions and symbols made on unfired shell casings, one of which had lyrics from the anti-fascist resistance song 'Bella Cioa' which honours Italian partisans who fought against Nazi German occupiers during the Second World War. 

      One is almost tempted to wonder whether Robinson - despite not being Jewish - saw himself as some kind of Basterd, i.e., a member of the fictional black ops commando unit led by Lt. Aldo Raine in Quentin Tarantino's 2009 film Inglorious Basterds who were tasked with "doin' one thing, and one thing only - killin' Nazis". 

      (I'm quoting from page 19 of Tarantino's script to the film, which is available via scriptslug.com to down load as a pdf: click here.)   

 

Theoscatology in Nietzsche and Lawrence

Nietzsche and D. H. Lawrence Skibidi Toilet style [1]

  

 

I. 

 

Philosophers, eh? The shit that sometimes comes out of their mouths!

 

Take Nietzsche, for example; did he really say that men must defecate in order to become divine?

 

Sort of. 

 

Only he wasn't talking about the discharging of faeces from the body, so much as the elimination of sin - i.e., spiritual rather than biological waste; the toxic consequence of bad conscience rather than the semi-solid remains of last night's dinner.  

 

That becomes clear if we look at what he writes in an unpublished note from late 1883:

 

Many things about man are not very godly: whenever a person excretes faeces, how can he be a god then? But it is even worse regarding the other faeces we call sin: man still surely wants to retain this, and not excrete it. Now however, I must believe it: a person can be a god and still excrete faeces. Thus I teach you, excrete your faeces and become gods. [2]

 

 

II.

 

Like Nietzsche, D. H. Lawrence is also concerned in his theoscatological musings with the elimination of certain adverse emotions. Our great task, he says, is to liberate the mind from its "fear of the body and the body's potencies" [3], before we fall ever further into madness [4].

 

Both authors, in other words, are concerned with the collapse of the primary instincts and the way in which internalised cruelty produces a moral subject [5]. And both wish for man to elevate himself by accepting those things which make us ashamed: 

 

"If we are ashamed, instead of covering the shame with a veil, let us accept the thing which makes us ashamed, understand it and be at one with it. If we shrink from some sickening issue of ourselves, instead of recoiling [...] let us go down into ourselves, enter the hell of corruption and putresence, and rise again, not fouled, but fulfilled and free." [6] 

 

This may involve an act of anal sex [7], or it may simply involve building a less hysterical relationship with language - particularly the so-called obscene words that cause us embarrassment; i.e., all the old words "that belong to the body below the navel" [8].

   

Lawrence continues:

 

"Myself, I am mystified at this horror over a mere word, a plain simple word that stands for a plain simple thing. 'In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was God and the Word was with God.' If that is true, then we are very far from the beginning. [...] Because today, if you suggest that the word arse was in the beginning and was God and was with God, you will just be put in prison at once. [...] Now that sort of thing is idiotic and humiliating. Whoever the god was that made us, he made us complete. He didn't stop at the navel, and leave the rest to the devil. [...] If the Word is God [...] then you can't suddenly say that all the words which belong below the navel are obscene. The word arse is as much god as the word face. It must be so, otherwise you cut your god off at the waist." [9] 

  

Notes

 

[1] Skibidi Toilet is a machinima web series created by Alexey Gerasimov in 2023 and released via his YouTube channel, DaFuq!?Boom! Featuring toilet bowls with human heads emerging, it has become hugely popular amongst the kids of Generation Alpha.

 

[2] See The Complete Works of Friedrich Nietzsche Volume 14: Unpublished Fragments from the Period of Thus Spoke Zarathustra (Summer 1882–Winter 1883/84), trans. Paul S. Loeb and David F. Tinsley, ed. Alan D. Schrift and Duncan Large (Stanford University Press, 2019). 

      Or, if one wishes to check the original German text, see KSA 10:635-37:23. 

      Richard Perkins discusses this fragment in his essay 'An Innocent Little Story: Nietzsche and Jesus in Allegorical Conjunction', Nietzsche Studien Volume 26, Issue 1 (1997), pp. 361-383. 

 

[3] D. H. Lawrence, A Propos of Lady Chatterley's Lover, ed. Michael Squires (Cambridge University Press, 1993), p. 309. 

 

[4] Lawrence famously attacks Swift for making his mistress Celia feel terrible about her own natural functions, including defecating. See the post entitled 'Celia Shits! Notes on Jonathan Swift's The Lady's Dressing Room and (Alleged) Coprophobia (2 April 2024): click here.  

 

[5] Nietzsche famously discuss this in the second essay of the Genealogy (1887). 

 

[6] D. H. Lawrence, 'The Reality of Peace', Reflections on the Death of a Porcupine and Other Essays, ed. Michael Herbert (Cambridge University Press, 1988), p. 35. 

 

[7] I have published several posts dealing with the subject of anal sex in Lawrence's work: click here.  

 

[8] D. H. Lawrence, 'Introduction to Pansies', Appendix 6 in The Poems, Vol. I., ed. Christopher Pollnitz (Cambridge University Press, 2013), p. 664. 

 

[9] Ibid.  

      Of course, there are some - like Sir Clifford Chatterley, for example, who delight in this idea of cutting God off at the waist; see chapter XVI of Lady Chatterley's Lover, where he reads to Connie from one of the 'latest scientific-religious books' - Whitehead's Religion in the Making (1926) - about the manner in which the universe is physically wasting and spiritually ascending. 

      Connie has no time for such nonsense, but Clifford insists that "'whatever God there is is slowly eliminating the guts and alimentary system from the human being, to evolve a higher, more spiritual being'" (see p. 235 of the 1993 CUP edition, ed. Michael Squires).   

 

Once Upon a Time ... There Was a Philosopher Named Friedrich Nietzsche and He Privileged a Pissing Giant Over Clever Dwarves

Nietzsche with Snow White, dwarves, and other fairy tale characters 

in a whimsical, enchanted forest with a gingerbread house

craiyon.com 

  

We think that play and fairy tales belong to childhood: how shortsighted that is! 

As though we would want at any time of life to live without play and fairy tales! [1]

 

 

I.  

 

As the above quotation demonstrates, Nietzsche always loved fairy tales - or Märchen, as the Germans call them - a genre of short story characterised by magical or supernatural elements, archetypal characters, a fantastical setting, and (all too often) a conventional moral lesson in which good triumphs over evil and order is restored to a chaotic world. 

 

So, no surprise then that he should write one of his own ...

 

 

II. 

 

Whilst in Turin, in April 1888 - only nine months before his collapse - Nietzsche scribbled an untitled short text about a giant and some dwarves into a notebook where it remained unpublished for many years [2]. 

 

Less than 150 words in the original German, it's a queer story about the mortal danger of being urinated upon when you are of restricted stature, by someone monstrously bigger in size. For it's not only unpleasant, when you're a dwarf, if a giant pisses on you, but there's the very real risk of drowning (a prospect that even the most ardent urophile might blanch at) [3].

 

Thus, the dwarves recognise that they have to find a way to prevent the giant from relieving his bladder - and, indeed, stop him from shitting on them as well.     

 

(Somehow, I don't think Disney are going to be bidding for the rights to make this into a film anytime soon.)  

 

For the oldest and wisest dwarf, this double danger presented something of a philosophical problem; clearly action needed to be taken in the face of an existential threat. But the situation necessitated not only trying to scare the giant away by tickling him and biting his toes - "customary means to encouraging and enforcing bowel and bladder control" [4] - but morally measuring up and rising to the challenge as a people.   

  

 

III. 

 

What are we to make of this ...?

 

The story seems to suggest that powerful individuals - in this case one who is great in size and strength - can become threatening to the well-being of others smaller in size and weaker in strength and therefore need to be restrained and, if possible, persuaded to curtail their natural instincts.         

 

But that would be a rather surprising lesson coming from Nietzsche who not only refuses to posit a doer separate from their deeds [5], but usually writes in praise of greatness and dislikes the little people who, in the name of morality and civilisation, wish to cut others down to their own size, à la David, slayer of Goliath (1 Samuel 17) [6]. 

 

Zarathustra, for example, is forever bemoaning the fact that everywhere he looks, everything has become smaller; houses, men, virtue and even happiness [7]. Small people, he says, mistake mediocrity for moderation and fundamentally only want one thing: that nobody shall do them any harm - and that includes not pissing on them.  

 

So, despite initial impressions, Nietzsche's tale is probably a satirical (uro-scatological) attempt to reverse values and "twist the standard Märchen perspective that establishes cultural relationships between giants and little people" [8].    

 

Ultimately, argues Richard Perkins: 

 

"The giant expresses a natural and cultural superfluity that squanders its great capacities. He represents 'overflowing' as such, and, in an important sense, his crude bodily eliminations illustrate the supreme value that Zarathustra designates as the 'gift-giving virtue' [...] The giant pisses away his virtue as gold glistens and as the sun radiates its creative brilliance." [9]   

 

And on that watersporty note ... 

 

 

Notes

 

[1] Nietzsche, Human, All Too Human (II. 1. 270), trans. R. J. Hollingdale (Cambridge University Press, 1986), p. 277. 

 

[2] For those who can read German, the tale can be found in the Critical Student Edition of Nietzsche's Complete Works: KSA 13: 483: 16. 

      For those who can't, an English translation by Richard Perkins is available in his essay 'A Giant and Some Dwarves: Nietzsche's Unpublished Märchen on the Exception and the Rule', in Marvels & Tales: Journal of Fairy Tale Studies, Vol. 11, Nos. 1-2 (Wayne State University Press, 1997), pp. 61-73. 

      This essay, which I shall quote from later in the post, is available to read or download on JSTOR: click here. 

 

[3] One wonders if Nietzsche ever read Rabelais's The Inestimable Life of the Great Gargantua (1535), in which the famous giant urinates on the city of Paris from the heights of Notre Dame, causing the people to flee, fearful that they'll be washed away in a torrent of piss (and, indeed, over 250,000 Parisians - not even counting the women and children - do drown in the resulting flood, according to Rabelais).     

 

[4] Richard Perkins, op. cit., p. 71. 

 

[5] Refuses, that is to say, to fall into the metaphysical and grammatical trap of thinking that there's a free-willing subject who can - and in certain circumstances ought - to change their behaviour. This clever moral move allows notions of blame, guilt, and sin (i.e., bad conscience) to enter into the world; see the Genealogy where all this is examined by Nietzsche in depth. 

      The key point is this: to ask a giant not to express his strength and not to piss when his bladder's full, is like asking an eagle not to prey upon a lamb. 

       

[6] One thinks also of how the good people of Lilliput are initially fearful and mistrustful of Gulliver and how, even after he has saved their land from invasion and extinguished a fire at the royal palace by, funnily enough, pissing on it, they turn on him and decide to blind him and starve him to death. 

      See Jonathan Swift's novel Gulliver's Travels (1726).   

 

[7] See 'Of the Virtue that Makes Small', in Thus Spoke Zarathustra. 

      See also 'On the Vision and the Riddle' in the same text, where Zarathustra (assuming the role of a giant) carries a dwarf on his shoulders in order to give the latter a glimpse of greatness. Unfortunately, however, the dwarf fails to understand the profundity of what he sees and Nietzsche is able to show why the metaphor about 'standing on the shoulders of giants' (i.e. accepting intellectual dependency on past figures) is something that needs to be critically re-examined. 

 

[8] Richard Perkins, op. cit., p. 66.  

 

[9] Ibid., p. 70. 

      Perkins also directs us towards another unpublished piece in which Nietzsche gives his philosophical project a scatological twist: a fragment dating to late 1883 (see KSA 10: 635-37), which concludes with the startling injunction to shit and become as gods! For a discussion of the theoscatological in Nietzsche (and Lawrence) please click here. 

 

On This Day ...

Sex Pistols: Johnny Rotten, Glen Matlock, Steve Jones, and Paul Cook

Photo by John Gray (1975)

 

 

I. 

 

I know that English historians who specialise in the early modern period will be keen to inform everyone they meet that today is the 540th anniversary of the Battle of Bosworth Field; i.e., the last major battle of the War of the Roses and the one in which Richard III bravely met his end (thereby bringing down the curtain on the Plantagenet dynasty and allowing the age of the Tudors to commence). 

 

And I know that English historians who prefer to get excited about the English Civil War will be reminding others that, on this day in 1642, Charles I raised his standard in Nottingham and effectively challenged the Parliamentarians to a fight (which, of course, did not end well for him and his fellow Royalists - losing not just his crown but his head seven years later). 

 

 

II. 

 

However, as a cultural critic more concerned with the art, fashion, and politics between 1870 and the present day, for me the most exciting event that happened on this date happened in 1975 at the Roebuck (354 King's Road) - namely, the first meeting between 19-year-old John Lydon and the other members of the band who were to become known as the Sex Pistols: Steve Jones, Paul Cook, and Glen Matlock. 

 

As Paul Gorman notes, at the time Lydon "cut a remarkable figure visually [...] he had cropped and dyed his spiky fair hair [...] and wore distressed and customised clothing" [1], most notably a torn Pink Floyd T-shirt upon which he had scawled the words I HATE above the band's logo. 

 

Steve Jones - who christened Lydon 'Johnny Rotten' because of his green teeth - may have thought (rightly) that he was an arsehole, but he had also to admit Lydon had style, attitude, and intelligence. 

 

And Malcolm agreed: after Lydon auditioned to be the group's singer by miming to a self-chosen track by Alice Cooper that happened to be on the jukebox at SEX [2], McLaren instantly recognised the young man had star quality (the band members were not quite so convinced of this, but McLaren was insistent that they had found the perfect frontman - even if he couldn't sing). 

 

 

III. 

 

Nietzsche writes that he is the kind of philosopher who breaks history in two; that one day mankind will mark time before him and after him [3].   

 

Perhaps we might say the same of the Sex Pistols in relation to popular culture. 

 

Indeed, we might also say of the latter what Nietzsche further says of himself: one day, there will be associated with their name the recollection of something momentous; of a No-saying to everything that until they came along had been believed in as the Good, the True, and the Beautiful, but which was dismissed in 1977 with but a single phrase: never mind the bollocks!  

 

They were, by far, the most terrible band there has ever been; but also the most necessary; anarcho-nihilists who knew joy in destruction and believed in the ruins. 

 

What a shame then, that, fifty years on, Jones, Cook, and Matlock are performing punk karaoke with Frank Carter fronting a kind of ersatz version of the Sex Pistols and Rotten ... well, don't get me started on the abject figure he has become ... [4]   

 

 

 

Sex Pistols: Johnny Rotten, Glen Matlock, Steve Jones and Paul Cook

Reworking John Gray's 1975 photo fifty years on (SA/2025) 

  

Notes

 

[1] Paul Gorman, The Life and Times of Malcolm McLaren (Constable, 2020), p. 278.  

 

[2] The track in question was 'I'm Eighteen', released as a single in November 1970, it also featured on the album Love It to Death (Warner Bros., 1971). To listen to the song on YouTube, click here.

 

[3] See Ecce Homo, trans. R. J. Hollingdale (Pengin books, 1979), 'Why I Am a Destiny' (8), p. 133.    

 

[4] I make my views clear on Rotten in a number of posts written over the last 12 years: click here, here, and here, for example. 

 

 

And Hate Shall Set You Free

And Hate Shall Set You Free 

SA von Hell after William Blake (2025) [a]

 

  

I. 

 

"We hate old friends: we hate old books: we hate old opinions; and at last we come to hate ourselves." [b] 

 

That's a great line from Hazlitt: far more philosophically profound and liberating than the Christian idea of learning to love one's enemies and the Californian injunction to love the self.   

 

Love binds: but it's hate that shall set you free; free from the expectation of those who think they know you best and oblige you to remain the person you've always been; free from ideas and viewpoints that have become fixed and congeal into forms of doxa or harden still further into dogma; free from a model of self born of internalised cruelty that some think of as an essential soul and others discuss in terms of subjective identity.  

 

 

II. 

 

Of course, it's difficult breaking from old friends and family members (unless they die or conveniently move far away). Nevertheless, it can be liberating to both parties to encounter one another once more as strangers (an acquaintance of mine once told me that he never loved his wife more than after their estrangement and subsequent divorce).    

 

The fact is, times change and we change and whilst some old friendships can last a lifetime, other friendships become "cold, comfortless, and distasteful" [131] like a plate of cold meat served up over and over again and even if we would like to revive old feelings that's impossible: "The stomach turns against them." [131]  

 

 

III. 

 

Perhaps it's even more difficult breaking from the authors one has loved; even when fully aware that one rewards great teachers not with loyalty but infidelity and by reading them against themselves; giving them over, as Hazlitt says, to the dissecting-knife or opening them up to ridicule [c].  

 

And great books must also be laid aside at some point and allowed to gather dust [d] - even become a little worm-eaten and mouldy. For as Nietzsche writes somewhere or other, it says nothing against the greatness of a spirit - or, in this case, a book - that it contains a few worms; corruption is a sign of maturity or ripeness and doesn't diminish overall value [e].  

 

IV. 

 

"As to my old opinions, I am heartily sick of them. I have reason, for they have deceived me sadly." [135] 

 

Again, I know exactly what Hazlitt means: old ideas and old beliefs that I once subscribed to in all sincerity at the very least embarrass today; words I once used to identify myself - punk and pagan, for example - "are become to my ears a mockery and a dream" [135].  

 

A true philosopher, says Nietzsche, cannot belong to any church or party that requires members to have moral convictions or political principles; for a philosopher is someone who burrows their way into a body, through it, and out the other side and never holds on to even their own ideas for too long, for this would imply that one could know oneself well enough to trust one's own thoughts and that simply isn't the case:

 

"We are unknown to ourselves, we knowers [...] We remain strange to ourselves out of necessity, we do not understand ourselves, we must confusedly mistake who we are [...]" [f] 

 

Hazlitt appears to find this lack of self-knowledge good cause for self-contempt; "mistaken as I have been in my public and private hopes [...] always disappointed where I placed most reliance [...] have I not reason to hate and to despise myself?" [136]

 

But then he adds an amusing final twist:  "Indeed I do; and chiefly for not having hated and despised the world enough." [136]

 

 

Notes

 

[a] The phrase hate shall set you free is obviously playing on the well-known biblical line: 'And ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free' (John 8:32 KJV). 

      Ever quick to point out the bleeding obvious and display it's moral colours, the Google AI assistant was keen to inform me that the phrase 'hate shall set you free' is neither a universally recognised nor an accepted statement and that the original saying is emphasising the liberating power of truth, not hate: 

      "While some may interpret it to mean that rejecting societal norms or expectations (through hate or defiance) can lead to liberation, it's crucial to understand that this interpretation is not a standard or positive one." 

      If I were Tracey Emin, I may have been tempted to write the phrase 'hate shall set you free' in the form of a neon sign, but - as I'm not Tracey Emin - I've simply added it the text to William Blake's 'Albion Rose', which can be found in A Large Book of Designs (1793-96). 

      I'm sure he wouldn't object; for Blake acknowledges the vital importance of hate as well as love within human existence by arguing that: "Without contraries there is no progression." See the Argument that opens The Marriage of Heaven and Hell (1790-93).       

 

[b] William Hazlitt, 'On the Pleasure of Hating', essay in The Plain Speaker: Opinions on Books, Men, and Things, originally published anonymously in two volumes, in 1826. 

      I am quoting from the text as it appears in Volume 7 of The Collected Works of William Hazlitt, ed. A. R. Waller and Arnold Glover (J. M. Dent and Co., 1903), p. 130, which was published as an eBook by Project Gutenberg in 2018: click here. Future page references to Hazlitt's essay will be given directly in the text.

 

[c] Hazlitt is right to say that we are aided and abetted in this by the fact that sometimes our favourite writers suddenly become fashionable and subject to an outpouring of academic analysis: 

      "The popularity of the most successful writers operates to wean us from them, by the cant and fuss that is made about them, by hearing their names everlastingly repeated, and by the number of ignorant and indiscriminate admirers they draw after them." [133]

     

[d] Even Hazlitt has some reservations about this; surely, he says, "there are some works, that, like nature, can never grow old and that must always touch the imagination and passions alike!" 

      Or, at the very least, there are books that contain passages "that seem as if we might brood over them all our lives, and not exhaust the sentiments of love and admiration they excite" [133]. 

      Having said that, however, Hazlitt confesses that, for him at least, any passage - even the most beautiful or stirring - soon becomes vapid if we read or recite it too often (see p. 134).

 

[e] See Nietzsche, Human, All Too Human, trans. R. J. Hollingdale (Cambridge University Press, 1986), Vol. 2, Part 1, Section 353, p. 292.

 

[f] Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morality, ed. Keith Ansell-Pearson, trans. Carol Diethe (Cambridge University Press, 1994), p. 3.  

 

 

For a couple of other recent posts inspired by Hazlitt's essay 'On the Pleasure of Hating' - discussing topics including spiders, ghosts, and witches - please click here and/or here.  

 

 

There is a Spider Crawling ...

 

'Without spiders, flies would have no wings ...'

 

 

Hazlitt's essay opens with a lovely passage about a spider crawling along the floor towards him. Rather than crush the unwelcome intruder, he allows the creature to pass by in peace and, in fact, aids his escape into a darkened space. 

 

This is the mark of a man whose philosophy has taught him how to behave with restraint even when confronted by a creepy-crawly whom he instinctively hates the sight of. In other words, although the spirit of malevolence has been curbed to the extent that he doesn't commit a needlessly cruel act, he still feels negatively towards the eight-legged other:    

 

"We give up the external demonstration, the brute violence, but cannot part with the essence or principle of hostility. We do not tread upon the poor little animal in question (that seems barbarous and pitiful!) but we regard it with a sort of mystic horror and superstitious loathing." [127-28] [a]

 

Hazlitt suspects it will take "another hundred years of fine writing and hard thinking" [128] before he gets over his arachnophobia and learn how to regard spiders with something approaching love and kindness. 

 

However, he doesn't wish to be cured entirely of his ability to hate. For without having something to hate - if not spiders, then snakes; if not snakes, then other people - man's ability to act or even to think is seriously compromised and rather than resembling a fast-moving and sparkling stream, life becomes a stagnant pool. 

 

Moralists may not like the fact, but pure goodness soon grows insipid and man finds delight in his unruly passions. Indeed, it may even be the case, as Zarathustra says, that man needs 'what is most evil in him for what is best in him.' [b] 

 

So it is that there's a seceret affinity between love and hate and the human heart desires the latter as much as the former. And since love soon turns to indifference or disgust, says Hazlitt, perhaps "hatred alone is immortal" [128] amongst the passions; not only the longest lasting, but primary, due to the simple fact that there is always a "quantity of superfluous bile" [128]. 

 

 

Notes

 

[a] William Hazlitt, 'On the Pleasure of Hating', essay in The Plain Speaker: Opinions on Books, Men, and Things, originally published anonymously in two volumes, in 1826. 

      I am using the text as it appears in volume 7 of The Collected Works of William Hazlitt, ed. A. R. Waller and Arnold Glover (J. M. Dent and Co., 1903), published as an eBook by Project Gutenberg in 2018: click here. All page numbers refer to this edition. 

 

[b] See Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra,  'The Convalescent' (2). 

      Of course, before either Nietzsche or Hazlitt were writing, Blake had already recognised that evil was only another term for the active expenditure of energy and that the feeling that results from this is a form of eternal delight. See 'The Marriage of Heaven and Hell' (1790).  

 

 

Readers may be interested in two sister posts inspired by Hazlitt's essay 'On the Pleasure of Hating':

 

'On the Need to Fear Ghosts and Hate Witches' (14 August 2025): click here.  

'And Hate Shall Set You Free' (15 August 2025): click here. 

 

 

Notes on Edgar Allan Poe's 'The Imp of the Perverse'

 

'The Imp of the Perverse' - Illustration by Arthur Rackham 

in Edgar Allan Poe's Tales of Mystery and Imagination (1935) [1] 

 

 

I. 

 

'The Imp of the Perverse' is a short story by Edgar Allan Poe, examining how a desire to do those things that we know we should not do can lead to our own destruction. 

 

This desire is imagined by Poe in the form of a small and mischievous being prone to causing trouble and leading men astray; i.e., what is called within European folklore an imp [2].   

 

Recommended to me by the Irish poet Síomón Solomon, I thought it might be nice to while away the hours on a Sunday afternoon reading it together ...

 

 

II. 

 

The story reads initially almost as an essay, as the narrator explains at length his theory on the imp of the perverse. 

 

Describing it as a primitive propensity of the human soul that causes people - including himself - to commit acts against their self-interest, he claims that it has been overlooked by scientists, priests, and other scholars because they could not perceive its necessity or understand how the imp of the perverse might advance knowledge of the human condition. 

 

In brief: the idea of it simply never occurred to them; it didn't fit into their scheme of things, including their map of the brain (the latter having been designed according to popular moral superstition by a rational and purposeful deity who had made man in his own image).   

 

Our narrator says: "Having thus fathomed to his satisfaction the intentions of Jehovah, out of these intentions [man] built his innumerable systems of mind" and a well organ-ised human body; i.e., one with a mouth for eating, an arse for shitting, and - having determined it to be God's will "that man should continue his species" - an organ of amativeness as well.      

 

In this way, we can conceive of man as an ideal creature, with every organ representing either "a propensity, a moral sentiment, or a faculty of the pure intellect". 

 

Deleuze and Guattari may not be happy with this arrangement, but they are in a minority; most people are content to believe they have a divine origin and a preconceived destiny (remember, dear reader, that this tale was written in 1845, thirty-seven years before Nietzsche's madman was to announce the death of God and over a hundred years before Aratud introduced the idea of a body without organs) [3].     

 

 

III. 

 

The narrator goes on to say that it would have been wiser to have classified man according to his actions, "rather than upon the basis of what we took it for granted the Deity intended him to do". For if we cannot comprehend God in his visible works, "how then in his inconceivable thoughts" ...? 

 

If only more attention had been paid to man's actions, then perverseness - "for want of a more characteristic term" - would have been recognised as "an innate and primitive principle of human action"; albeit an irrational one in that it obliges us to act in a way that often makes no sense and has no benefit (which, in fact, is often harmful): 

 

"In theory, no reason can be more unreasonable; but, in fact, there is none more strong. With certain minds, under certain conditions, it becomes absolutely irresistible. I am not more certain that I breathe, than that the assurance of the wrong or error of any action is often the one unconquerable force which impels us, and alone impels us to its prosecution. Nor will this overwhelming tendency to do wrong for the wrong's sake, admit of analysis, or resolution into ulterior elements. It is a radical, a primitive impulse - elementary." 

 

And this, says the narrator, is undeniable: "No one who trustingly consults and thoroughly questions his own soul, will be disposed to deny the entire radicalness of the propensity in question." 

 

I suppose, if I stop to think about it, there may well be something in what he says. Certainly, whenever I'm presenting a paper to an audience and I look around the faces gathered before I begin, I'm often tempted, sensing no connection, to simply walk off the stage and out of the room without a word of explanation (something Larry David was notorious for doing during his early days as a stand-up comic).  

 

Either that, or to stay and piss people off with deliberate vagueness and a refusal to take a position: 

 

"The speaker is aware that he displeases [...] yet, the thought strikes him, that by certain involutions and parentheses, this anger may be engendered. That single thought is enough. The impulse increases to a wish, the wish to a desire, the desire to an uncontrollable longing, and the longing [...] is indulged." 

 

Having said that, sometimes, like Sebastian Horsley, I'm only too happy to flatter an audience and adapt my views to suit them [4] (being transpositional means I can move swiftly from one side of an argument to the other - or neither - without too much cognitive dissonance). 

 

As for procrastination ... Well, I'll say something about that later [5].

 

 

IV. 

 

Is it the imp of the perverse that ultimately brings us to the brink of suicide? That tempts us to "peer into the abyss" until we grow sick and dizzy? 

 

Possibly. 

 

"Our first impulse is to shrink from the danger. Unaccountably we remain. By slow degree our sickness and dizziness, and horror, become merged in a cloud of unnameable feeling" 

 

Is the ultimate practice of joy before death to imagine "our sensations during the sweeping precipitancy of a fall from such a height"? 

 

Again, that's possible - and it would explain Annabella's ecstasy as she stands atop the Eiffel Tower and contemplates jumping to her death [6]. This thought of falling - "for the very reason that it involves that one most ghastly and loathsome of all the most ghastly and loathsome images of death and suffering which have ever presented themselves to our imagination" - is the thing she most vividly desires. 

 

"And because our reason violently deters us from the brink, therefore, do we the more impetuously approach it. There is no passion in nature so demoniacally impatient, as that of one, who shuddering upon the edge of a precipice, thus meditates a plunge." 

 

Again, it's not rational; it's a perverse defiance of logic, sound reason, and common sense. But without a "friendly arm to check us" - Annabella looks round for someone strong and brave to save her - there's a very strong possibility we will jump and meet a very sticky end. 

 

 

V.

 

It turns out that the narrator is in chains sitting in a condemned man's prison cell; that the above is an attempt to explain how he came to find himself in such circumstances. He's not mad, as most people think, but is rather "one of the many uncounted victims of the Imp of the Perverse".   

 

What happened, exactly? 

 

Well, the narrator commited murder in order to inherit a man's estate: 

 

"It is impossible that any deed could have been wrought with a more thorough deliberation. For weeks, for months, I pondered upon the means of the murder. I rejected a thousand schemes, because their accomplishment involved a chance of detection."

 

Eventually, after reading some French memoirs, he hits on the idea of using a poisoned candle (i.e., one that releases toxic fumes when burned): 

 

"The idea struck my fancy at once. I knew my victim’s habit of reading in bed. I knew, too, that his apartment was narrow and ill-ventilated."  

 

And although he effectively got away with it after a coroner declared the death to be in accordance with the will of God, he is eventually gripped by a self-destructive impulse to confess his crime in public:

 

"Having inherited his estate, all went well with me for years. The idea of detection never once entered my brain. Of the remains of the fatal taper, I had myself carefully disposed. I had left no shadow of a clue by which it would he possible to convict, or even to suspect me of the crime. It is inconceivable how rich a sentiment of satisfaction arose in my bosom as I reflected upon my absolute security. For a very long period of time, I was accustomed to revel in this sentiment. It afforded me more real delight than all the mere worldly advantages accruing from my sin. But there arrived at length [...] a haunting and harassing thought [...] I could scarcely get rid of for an instant." 

 

"One day, while sauntering along the streets, I arrested myself in the act of murmuring, half aloud [...] 'I am safe - I am safe - yes - if I be not fool enough to make open confession!'  No sooner had I spoken these words, than I felt an icy chill creep to my heart."

 

For our narrator knows where his perversity would lead; first to jail and then to the gallows - and that there was nothing he could do about it: 

 

"I had had some experience in these fits of perversity [...] and I remembered well, that in no instance, I had successfully resisted their attacks. And now my own casual self suggestion, that I might possibly be fool enough to confess the murder of which I had been guilty, confronted me, as if the very ghost of him whom I had murdered - and beckoned me on to death." 

 

Poe concludes his tale with the following passages, spoken by the narrator:

 

"At first, I made an effort to shake off this nightmare of the soul. I walked vigorously - faster - still faster - at length I ran. I felt a maddening desire to shriek aloud. Every succeeding wave of thought overwhelmed me with new terror [...] I still quickened my pace. I bounded like a madman through the crowded thoroughfares. At length, the populace took the alarm, and pursued me. I felt then the consummation of my fate. 

      Could I have torn out my tongue, I would have done it - but a rough voice resounded in my ears - a rougher grasp seized me by the shoulder. I turned - I gasped for breath. For a moment, I experienced all the pangs of suffocation; I became blind, and deaf, and giddy; and then, some invisible fiend, I thought, struck me with his broad palm upon the back. The long-imprisoned secret burst forth from my soul."

      They say that I spoke with a distinct enunciation, but with marked emphasis and passionate hurry, as if in dread of interruption before concluding the brief but pregnant sentences that consigned me to the hangman and to hell. 

      Having related all that was necessary for the fullest judicial conviction, I fell prostrate in a swoon."

 

 

VI.

 

Is there any more to say? 

 

Only that Poe's abysmal theory - and I'm using that word in the literary-philosophical sense - of the imp of the perverse is, as fearful thoughts go, one that I like very much; it might not be quite as chilling as he intended, but it certainly makes one question one's own self-destructive tendencies and the desire to deliberately give the game away as it were [7].    

 

It's surely better to think we confess our sins not from guilt or a moral sense of right and wrong (conscience) but from perversity; I for one would rather have a little imp on my shoulder than that annoying little twat Jiminy Cricket.  

 

 

Notes

 

[1] All quotes from and references to 'The Imp of the Perverse' are to the version published in this edition of Poe's tales which can be read free online by clicking here. 

      The tale first appeared in the July 1845 issue of Graham's Magazine (Vol. XXVIII). 

 

[2] I'm assuming that Poe decided on the figure of an imp rather than that of a demon or some othersupernatural entity because it might be read as short for impulse (i.e., a strong and sudden urge to act). It might also suggest the related term impetus (i.e., a force which drives something forward).  

 

[3] Antonin Artaud first used the phrase corps sans organes in his 1947 radio play known in English as To Have Done with the Judgment of God, describing it as a state of liberation from imposed structures and automatic reactions, allowing for true freedom. It was later developed as a philosophical concept by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari in their two-volume study of capitalism and schizophrenia: L'anti-Œdipe (1972) and Mille Plateaux (1980). 

      Nietzsche first used the phrase Gott ist tot in Die fröhliche Wissenschaft (1882), III. 125. It quickly became so well associated with him that it has almost become his catchphrase.

 

[4] Upon seeing someone make for the exit in the middle of a talk he was giving about his life as a dandy in the underworld, Horsley magnificently said: 'Don't go, I'll say the opposite if it will make you love me.' 

 

[5] Only joking. And in fact I have already written about this topic; see the post of 14 June 2014: click here. The narrator of Poe's tale does provide a nice description of procrastination for those who are interested: 

      "We have a task before us which must be speedily performed. We know that it will be ruinous to make delay. The most important crisis of our life calls, trumpet-tongued, for immediate energy and action. We glow, we are consumed with eagerness to commence the work, with the anticipation of whose glorious result our whole souls are on fire. It must, it shall be undertaken to-day, and yet we put it off until to-morrow; and why? There is no answer, except that we feel perverse using the word with no comprehension of the principle."   

 

[6] I'm referring to the Bow Wow Wow song 'Sexy Eiffel Towers' which first appeared on Your Cassette Pet (EMI Records, 1980) and, later, on the compilation album Girl Bites Dog (Parlophone Records, 1993): click here.  

 

[7] I think it may be stretching things to suggest that Poe's fictional theory of the imp of the perverse anticipates Freud's psychoanalytic concept of the death drive, but, nevertheless, several commentators have been quick to see and insist upon a connection.